Transfer rate (5.0)

Good day all, hope there's a quick answer for this one.
My home internet connection is as slow as rolling mud. With a 56K modem I usually
get 28.8 or 26.4 kbps (the same laptop at another address and I get 56 kbps so I don't
think its the computer).
But here's the kicker: when I download I can watch the transfer rate go down. It usually
starts out at 6-something but continually goes down and bottoms out at about 3-something.
I've set the temp file size at 500-meg.
Any thoughts or comments (besides the obviouse "Get a dedicated DSL line") are appreciated.

Re: Transfer rate (5.0)

It sounds like your telephone line is the problem. Have you listened for any noise, static or other distant conversations on your line?
Just use you phone and dial one digit to remove the dial tone and listen for any of these things,. If you do, call telephone company and report the poor line conditions. ( don't give up when they say: all tests were OK and you still hear the noise. )

The reason you probably see the line transfer rate go down, is that the modem is getting errors at the higher speed and attempts to negotiate a slower speed with the distant modem. If things gets really bad you will get disconnects.

Re: Transfer rate (5.0)

I just learned about this today. It may be something most Loungers know, but it was new to me, so I thought I'd share it.

I'd been puzzled for a long time about the fact that my dial-up connection speed was typically somewhere around 50Kbps, but whenever I'd do a file download, the download progress window always seemed to show me a speed that would stabilize at around 5KB/sec. I'd wondered if maybe one of my modem settings was incorrect, but never looked into it.

It turns out that a little bit of the difference relates to ideal vs. actual throughput, but most of the difference corresponds to the fact that the connection speed is expressed in kilobits per second, while the download progress window shows kilobytes per second. And although bits vs. bytes involves a factor of 8, you can, as a general rule (subject to some variation) expect your download transfer rate (in kilobytes/sec.) to be about 1/10th of your displayed internet connection speed (in kilobits /sec.). If you're interested, you can read more here.